The LDH revealed that the patient was over age 65, had underlying medical conditions and contracted bird flu after exposure to both wild birds and a non-commercial backyard flock.

The death in Louisiana — involving a person with underlying health conditions — is the first human case in the United States linked to exposure to backyard birds, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The U.S. will rebuild its stockpile of bird flu vaccines for poultry matched to the current strain of the virus circulating among commercial flocks and wild birds, the Department of Agriculture said on Wednesday.

Any time a person catches H5N1, or bird flu, their infection is a chance for the virus to mutate in the wrong direction. When someone dies from the bird flu—as an elderly Louisiana man did on Jan. 6,

More should be done to control the spread of bird flu among animals to avoid more cases in humans, the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) said on Wednesday, following the first death of a patient from the virus in the United States.

With reports of the first human death from bird flu in the US, some Americans are feeling an uncomfortable flashback to the early days of Covid-19, when infectious disease experts were talking about a new virus that was sending people to the hospital with respiratory infections.